Jack Steele 3446 words
240 Regency Drive
Marstons Mills, MA 02648
508-280-8645
Mom and Dad
By
Jack Steele
The television is in the room across the hall from his parents’ bedroom. His younger brother sleeps on the bunk bed in the room. There is also a couch. When the whole family watches TV, the most common arrangement is for his mother to be on the couch, his father on the bottom bunk, his brother on the top bunk, and him on the floor. The room is just the right size for the four of them. Even when he was little, he could almost stretch out on the floor and touch the TV with his fingers, the bunk bed with his toes, and the couch with his left hand. But the whole family doesn’t watch TV together every night. Only on Sundays for sure, and then only Ed Sullivan. Sunday night is also the only time they don’t eat supper at the table. They have Campbell’s chicken noodle soup or grilled cheese sandwiches, usually during Maverick. His father likes Maverick. It’s the only TV show he’s ever known his father to make it a point to watch. His mother is usually busy in the kitchen until right before Ed Sullivan, when she brings in dessert. His father never laughs at the comedians, not out loud. He likes a few of them, but he never laughs out loud. He’s pretty hard on most of the acts. Not funny. Too oddball. Gets on his nerves. A has been or never was. His mother’s favorite comment is that a performer likes himself or herself too much, or that a female singer is showing too much cleavage. He wonders why they watch Ed Sullivan. He likes just about everything, even the acrobats and spinning plates. Even Maurice Chevaliar. Even Mary Martin in Peter Pan, although the only really good thing about that was being able to see the wires that held her up.
He learns never to recommend or praise anything, since his father never likes it. Besides Maverick, the only thing they watch together is Charlie Chan movies, and those not very often since they only come on after bedtime during the week. But in the summer, when there are no bedtime rules, he and his father sometimes watch Charlie Chan. His father starts calling him his number one son and his younger brother his number two son. He understands that his father likes the detective’s amused and condescending attitude, along with the deference the Chan sons show him.
*****
He’s not a sickly child. He rarely if ever misses school. He never throws up, never even has earaches like his brother. He is healthy except for one thing, maybe two. His nose is always “stuffed up,” and he apparently makes a lot of noise breathing when he sleeps. They take him first to Dallas and then to Oklahoma City to an allergy clinic where the doctors stick little pins in his arms and back. It doesn’t hurt too much, but it’s very hard to sit still for so long a time. He’s allergic to a million things, they say, but especially chocolate and corn. For a while his mother gives him allergy shots twice a week, and he eats candy bars with no chocolate, Paydays and peanut butter logs, and passes up popcorn at the movies. He doesn’t know if it helps. He didn’t even know he was “stuffed up” until his mother told him. She noticed, she said, because he is always sniffing. He didn’t know he was sniffing. He’s sniffed his whole life, she tells him, and has trouble breathing from time to time. At one point he finds himself in a childrens’ hospital in Dallas for a couple of weeks. He has bronchitis, they tell him. That’s okay. He doesn’t feel sick and he likes spending the day reading baseball magazines and playing a horse racing board game.
The only thing he doesn’t like about the hospital is the food, and that is almost completely made up for when his father sneaks a box of fried chicken past the nurses one night. With french fries and a coke. It’s probably the best food he’s ever tasted. Nevertheless, it brings him no closer to his father. Nor do the times when he gets him to tell another grownup the American and National League standings that day, and how many games separate the first three or four teams. Or how to spell something. He can spell nearly any word any grownup can think of. Most days he hardly sees his father. During the week his father is gone before breakfast and gets home after he and his brother have eaten. On Saturdays he is running errands or mowing the lawn or doing paperwork at the dining room table. On Sundays he reads the paper and takes a nap. Sunday dinner is always a roast, and although he likes roast and all the things his mother usually makes to go with it, he does not think of those meals with pleasure. Or any meal when his father is present. He must pay more attention when his father is there. He must be more careful to mind his manners. He must ask for someone to pass the peas rather than reach across the table for them. Use his napkin and not the back of his hand. Not drop his fork. Not eat too fast. He must do most of those things when it’s just him and his brother and his mother at the table, but he doesn’t care so much when his mother reminds him. It’s not quite so much like he did something wrong. It doesn’t embarrass him. Even when his father’s tone is not particularly harsh, when he does something wrong in front of him, when it’s necessary to be corrected by him, he is embarrassed.
They go to the 1954 Cotton Bowl game. Just the two of them, Rice versus Alabama. Forty yard line tickets, about halfway up. Good seats. His father is shooting pictures with an 8mm movie camera when an Alabama player, identified later as Tommy Lewis, jumps off the bench and tackles Dicky Moegle, the star Rice halfback. Dicky Moegle is a big part of why they are there. It is still the era of college halfbacks. Broken field runners, as they were called. Doak Walker of SMU. Jim Swink of TCU. Billy Cannon of LSU. It is late in the second half, and Dicky Moegle has already run circles around the Crimson Tide. He can’t get over that nickname, mainly because it’s not an animal, or even really a thing. Not an owl or a mustang or a horned frog. It’s a tide, whatever that is, and why crimson? Crimson is red, his father explains, and a tide is how the water comes in from the ocean, but he doesn’t know either why a football team from Alabama would be named the Crimson Tide, or that Alabama had a crimson tide, or exactly what one would be. In any case, the Crimson Tide is getting soundly beat by the Owls, by Dicky Moegle in particular, and as Moegle runs for yet another touchdown along the sideline, the nearest opposing player several yards behind and losing ground, a player comes out of nowhere and tackles him. The whole Alabama bench stands up and gathers around, blocking whatever is happening on the field. Nothing like this has ever happened before, but it doesn’t take long for the referees to award the touchdown to Rice. Moegle was only fifteen yards from the goal line. No one was near him until Tommy Lewis jumped off the bench and tackled him.
He can’t think of a worse thing. It is painful to think of being Tommy Lewis, but he can’t help it. He can’t stop himself from feeling Tommy Lewis’ embarrassment. Ruined for life is one of his mother’s favorite expressions, and surely, if anyone was ever in that situation, it had to be Tommy Lewis. He didn’t know how he could live with himself, how he could ever stop thinking about it. And what was he thinking? He tried to understand it. He tried to put himself on the Alabama bench. The paper the next day said that Lewis got “carried away.” He couldn’t imagine it. It would be the same as jumping off a skyscraper, or from an airplane without a parachute. No one got that carried away. The paper didn’t say he was crazy, but that’s what everyone thought. And yet, it wasn’t quite crazy enough. It wasn’t really jumping from an airplane, not that extreme. It made too much sense. He couldn’t imagine doing it, having the nerve, but he could imagine wanting to. He could see, the more he thought about it, how Tommy Lewis could want to stop Dicky Moegle so bad that he couldn’t make himself not do it. And that’s what made it really painful. Even scary. Everyone knew that Tommy Lewis couldn’t control himself, that he was incapable of not doing something that was absolutely forbidden, and in newspapers all over the country there were pictures of him doing it.
It is the only college football game he attends as a boy, and it doesn’t make him any closer to his father. He knows his father wouldn’t have bought the tickets if it hadn’t been for him, if he hadn’t said at some point, not meaning it as a hint since he never imagined that it was possible, that he wished he could go to the Cotton Bowl. He knows that, how special it is, and he and his father both enjoy the game, but their relationship afterwards is the same as always. He knows, even before he’s old enough to actually think it, he knows that he must always say the right thing around his father. He is cut no slack. Even when his father is indifferent to or puzzled by what he says, rather than angry or impatient, he doesn’t like to say the wrong thing.
*****
He and his brother are told one night by their mother to go wake up their father. He’s asleep on the couch in the living room. It’s time for him to come to bed. They don’t like the assignment. Waking up their father is not something they want to do. They even object, but their mother tells them not to be silly. He’s not going to bite. She shames them into it, but they still keep their distance and call out “Daddy” in quiet voices. No response, until finally he works up the nerve to tap him on the shoulder. His father jumps. He jumps back. His father opens his eyes and sits up. He says, “Go tell your mother to come here.” It makes no sense. That’s why they woke him up. So she wouldn’t have to get out of bed. The brothers look at each other, on the verge of objecting, but not wanting to get yelled at. But he screws up his courage once again and asks his father what he just said. He’s told again, this time more firmly. “Go tell your mother to come here.” They run to the bedroom to tell their mother that something is wrong with Daddy. She shakes her head like they’ve gone crazy, gets out of bed in a huff and goes to the kitchen. His father is standing at the counter, drinking a glass of milk. He remembers nothing of the incident, not even that the boys woke him up.
The closest he ever felt to his father was in a car one midsummer afternoon in the New Mexico desert, his mother and younger brother in the back seat, his father drinking bourbon and driving eighty miles an hour. “You’re going too fast,” his mother said, and his father slowed down a little, but not much and not for long. His father was in such a good mood that he asked him what he wanted for dinner, and he said enchiladas, and his parents asked at the motel if there was a good Mexican place in town, his mother telling him that the woman said the restaurant was “just a little hole in the wall.” He didn’t know what that meant. He imagined a place that only a mouse could get into. “A small place,” she explained. He didn’t care for the enchiladas. The sauce was dark brown and bitter. Not at all like Texas enchiladas. But he tried to hide his disappointment. He didn’t want to spoil his father’s mood. The trip in general, to Colorado, was a failure, the only vacation they ever took. All he and his brother wanted to do was swim and play miniature golf. It was too cold in the mountains to swim and the motels they stayed at didn’t have heated pools. They were on a very tight budget. His father would inquire about the price at the motel office, and if it was eleven or twelve dollars a night instead of eight, they would try another one. His parents discussed it in the car, and it was mostly his mother who insisted on keeping to the budget. His mother was cheap. His father wasn’t. That was something that was always understood. He and his brother felt that his father would have stayed at the twelve dollar places if his mother hadn’t been so stern about it. A few times his parents debated about it, not really an argument, since his father gave in so quickly. He apparently thought she was right. About his driving, though, he wouldn’t listen to her. She was afraid of the gravel road up to Pike’s Peak. She kept saying that if he didn’t slow down they were going to run off the road and fall off the mountain, until his father finally blew up. Those were the worst times. It was time to be absolutely quiet, to disappear in the back seat. His father got irritated about the swimming and the miniature golf. The sites, the mountains and caves and old mining towns, were why they came to Colorado. Why couldn’t his boys appreciate that? He got very irritated. He got red in the face and he grumbled, but he didn’t blow up. He blew up only when someone didn’t do what he told them to do. Not caring about the mountains, preferring swimming pools and miniature golf, was a minor offense.
*****
He talks often with his mother and for a long time told her everything. Everything he thought and almost everything he did. He never thought about having secrets from her, and he began to have them only with great reluctance, when he realized that there were some things she’d rather not hear. They embarrassed her, and when she was embarrassed, he was embarrassed. Slowly but surely, then, and only to avoid such moments, he developed a sense for what was going too far, and every time he pulled himself up, it hurt a little. He wanted to tell her everything, and he wanted her to understand it all, every last confidence, every last emotion, every last thought. Everything. He did not want to be separated from his mother. In a perfect world, she would be with him everywhere, and she would understand him completely, know everything about him. In a way, he would be no more than an extension of her. When he played ball. When he looked at the maps in the encyclopedia. When he swam naked at the Y. When he went to the bathroom. When he slept and dreamed. He would be like a ghost released from her body, transparent, spirit-like, as he stepped out of her body, and then he would turn into a real boy, solid, absorbed in play, but only until she called him back.
He does not learn this anywhere. The only time he has ever read anything about mothers is in a biography of Lou Gehrig. Lou Gehrig and his mother were very close and fished for eels in the middle of the night. He appreciated Gehrig’s devotion to his mother, but he did not connect it with his own feelings. Gehrig’s mother was not his mother, and he wasn’t Gehrig. Nor has he talked about mothers with anyone, except his father, whose sole message is respect, which means obey and no talking back. He rarely talks back—he knows how serious his father is about that—and only when he is upset enough to do it without thinking. He disobeys more often, but in a similar way. Not thinking. Or not allowing himself to think. If he remembers, he feels his face turn red, and he stops. Usually, it involves not coming home when expected, a serious offense, but one he cannot resist when he is having fun. And sometimes, he has to willfully not remember, almost force himself to lose track of time. It is a giddy feeling, losing track of time. There is no other word for it. To him it means both exciting and scary.
His mother has a small hump on her back and her arms and the backs of her hands are always covered with scratches. It is two completely separate problems. When she was about fourteen, her mother noticed that one side of her back was larger, stuck out, more than the other. The doctor said she had curvature of the spine, probably from carrying her school books. She needed an operation, the doctor said, or else when she was fully grown she’d be able to touch the ground with her fingers without bending over. This frightened everyone. They agreed to the operation. A bone was taken out of her leg and put in her back. She was in a cast, flat on her back, for six months when she was sixteen. She showed him the scar on her leg. She told him she had to buy loose tops so that the hump, which was still there, wouldn’t show. It seemed to be slowly but surely getting worse. It is sore most of the time. Her back hurts if she does “too much.” They no longer did that operation. She wasn’t sure if it was a success or not, since she had no way of knowing what would have happened if she hadn’t had it.
The scars have a simpler explanation. She is allergic to direct sunlight. Her arms itched and she would scratch them until they bled. Yes, she tries to keep them covered whenever she goes outside, but sometimes she forgets.
He doesn’t feel sorry for his mother. Even when she said she was always self-
conscious about her back, there was no reason to feel sorry for her. That’s just how it was, how she was. It didn’t make her any different. He knew more about her, but that didn’t change anything. Nothing he could ever learn about her would change his mother. It would only make her more clear to him, like the story about how his father courted her when she was in the cast. They had only met once, at a party, from which he would have taken her home, but he had a flat tire. And then he showed up at the house when she was in the cast. “He came to visit me,” she said, “nearly every day for six months, and me flat on my back.” She talked about how bad it was to be in the cast. She alluded only vaguely to the physical problems, something about bed sores, and emphasized the tedium. Six months of not being able to get off of your back, but he didn’t feel sorry for her, or admire her for enduring it. She was his mother. It would be like feeling sorry for himself, which he rarely did at that point in his life. She is always there, almost always in the kitchen when he gets home from school, and they talk while he eats his snack, and then he goes out and shoots baskets. His father put up a backboard above the carport, and it wasn’t long before he had a deadly jump shot that he almost never missed. It was a good place for it. From the kitchen his mother could hear the ball bounce on the asphalt driveway, and he didn’t have to worry about losing track of time.
No comments:
Post a Comment